Master's Profile: Olympios Petrakis

Current Position: Software engineer at NetApp

Undergraduate degree: B.S. in Electrical Engineering, University of Washington

Duke ECE Path: Master of Science (MS)–Coursework path

Why Did You Choose Duke?

I value the close ties that Duke has with the industry. I wanted to be able align my studies at Duke with the current challenges facing the industry. Studying for a master's degree at Duke allowed me to do that.

Tell us about your master's project

One of the most exciting projects I worked on was the implementation of a fully encrypted file system, with a focus on performance. I came up with a solution to decrease encryption/decryption latency by exploiting concurrency when possible.

Why did you choose that topic?

I was surprised to see that most of the well-known block cipher modes are sequential in nature in favor of security. I was motivated to explore alternative existing methods to encrypt by allowing parallelism without sacrificing security.

What was the most surprising thing you learned?

I realized that in most cases, the term "unbreakable encryption" pretty much means "just not enough time and hardware to break it."